Student apartment towers under debate
The UTILE organization has plans for several new apartment towers for students, in Griffintown and the McGill ghetto, but some residents are not happy although I feel there’s a certain irony in any modern Griffintown dweller complaining about residential construction.
DeWolf 11:58 on 2024-02-18 Permalink
Keep in mind this is a form of social housing: affordable non-profit apartments for students. It’s good for everyone in the long run because students aren’t being gouged and they aren’t competing with everyone else for regular market-rate apartments.
And yet these projects are being opposed because they’re too “tall” and they “don’t fit in.” The one near McGill is 17 storeys, roughly the same height as the two adjacent buildings. The Griffintown project is 18 floors within spitting distance of a 62-storey tower going up two blocks away.
The Griffintown opponents are NIMBY hypocrites who expected their condo tower to be the last one ever built. And the architecture professor who is opposed to the McGill development is completely out to lunch, given that the McGill Ghetto is already a big mix of building types and scales. He seems to think that any new development in the area should be no more than a few storeys tall, economics be damned. Better a quaint Victorian for millionaires than high-rise apartments!
To me, any opposition to these projects is a show of bad faith: it means you care more about some fuzzy idea of neighbourhood character than you do about actually providing affordable housing to people who need it.
Luckily, these are considered community housing by law, which means they are exempt from the usual public consultation and referendum process. Imagine if every well-to-do condo dweller had the right to veto new social housing…
bob 15:27 on 2024-02-18 Permalink
Le projet « nous ramène à un urbanisme moderne des années 1960 : conçu et construit sans égard pour un quartier et son histoire »,
Isn’t “conçu et construit sans égard pour un quartier et son histoire” the very motto of Griffintown?
Nicholas 18:32 on 2024-02-18 Permalink
Pulling up the ladder after you’ve climbed it: I’m not going to say whom it applies to, but.